Americans were kept waiting to hear who their 43rd president would be when the result of a too-close-to-call election hinged on Florida - a state with a few 'eccentric' election practices.

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America found itself in the middle of a constitutional crisis on this day in 2000 after the general election was locked in a too-close-to-call fight in three states, between the then-Democratic Vice President Al Gore and the Republican challenger, George W Bush.

After a campaign during which the two candidates were consistently neck-and-neck in the polls, election day saw Bush sweep the south and much of the Midwest – but Gore took the northeastern states and the west coast to narrowly lead in electoral college votes with three states still to declare.

Winning New Mexico with five electoral college votes (ECVs) and Oregon (with seven) alone would not be enough for either candidate to establish a winning majority. Thus the outcome of the election would be decided on the result in Florida, which offered 25 ECVs.

The following morning, America would still not have a President – despite many newspapers calling Florida for Bush prematurely. The Texan governor was initially said to have won the state by a margin of 1,784 votes out of a total of nearly six million cast.

Florida state law provided for an automatic machine recount if a candidate’s margin of victory was 0.5% or less. As attention focused on the state’s election practices, it soon became clear that it had a number of eccentricities, and both parties geared up for a protracted legal battle.

A purge of over 54,000 people from the electoral roll for being ‘felons’ had occurred, when many of those were not (at least in Florida). There were also an unusually large number of ballot papers on which two choices for President had been marked.

Furthermore, in Palm Beach a folding ‘butterfly ballot’ with candidates’ names staggered down the page caused confusion, and an abnormal number of votes for third party candidate Pat Buchanan; over 3,000 Gore supporters were estimated to have accidentally voted for Buchanan.

The controversy rumbled on, and on December 8 the Florida courts ordered a manual recount of all disputed ballots. However, this decision was overthrown by the US Supreme Court the following day; Bush was found to have won the state - and thus the Presidency – by a margin of 537 votes, or just 0.009% of the total votes cast there.

The 2000 US election – Did you know?

Al Gore was the incumbent Vice President under Bill Clinton, but Clinton had faced numerous scandals and recently been impeached by Congress. Gore distanced himself from his President, a strategy which may have lost as well as won him votes.

With the three states still to declare, Gore had 255 ECVs and Bush 246. A total of 270 was required to win the election; Bush eventually triumphed with 271 votes.

Though much attention focussed on the ‘hanging chads’ of the punch-hole ‘butterfly’ ballot paper in Palm Beach, there were also numerous anomalies in Florida voting which may have favoured Gore.

All five major US TV networks incorrectly stated Florida's polls closed at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time; in fact, some western counties – traditionally Republican-heavy – were actually in the Central Time Zone and had polls open for another hour.

However, some 57,746 voters were scrubbed from the electoral roll as felons incorrectly; many had names similar to real felons, and some ‘felonies’ were dated years in the future. Most did not realise they were not allowed to vote until they were turned away at the polls.

The US Supreme Court decision to shut down the manual recounts in Florida was a 5-4 split between its nine judges; the five in favour were Republicans, the four against Democrats.

Remarkably, Bush’s 537-vote winning margin was not the narrowest in the election. Gore won New Mexico by just 363 votes – though that still represented a bigger proportion of all the voters in the state than the margin in the much heavier-populated Florida.

Several post-election studies revealed that none of the local recounts in Florida requested by the Gore legal team would have affected the outcome of the election - but a state-wide recount may have done.